And finally a poem called Before Us.
You were there all the time.
And I saw only the days, the air, the nights,
the moon changing, cars passing, and faces at windows.
The windows, the rain, the leaves, the years.
Words on pages telling of something else.
Wind in a mirror.
Everything begins so late after all
when the solitaires have already gone and the doves of Tanna.
When the laughing owls have long been followed
by question marks, and honeycreepers
and the brown bears of Atlas, the white wolf and the sea mink
have not been seen by anyone living.
We wake so late after many dreams, it is clear.
When the lake has vanished, the shepherds
have left the schielings, grandparents
have dissolved with their memories,
dictionaries are full of graves.
Most of the rivers are lethal.
We thought we were younger through all those ages
of knowing nothing.
And there you are at last, after such fallings
away and voyages beside me in the dawning room.
We wake together and the world is here and its dew.
You are here, and the morning is whole.
Finally, the light is young.
Because it is here, it is not like anything.
How could it have taken you so long to appear, bloom of air,
tenderness of leaves?
Where were you when the lies were voting
and the fingers believed faces on money?
Where were we when the smoke washed us
and the hours cracked as they rang?
Where was I when we passed each other on the same streets
and traveled by the same panes to the same stations?
Now we have only the age that is left to be together.
The brief air, the vanishing green,
ordure in office, tourists on the headland,
the last hours of the sea.
Now we have only the words we remember to say to each other.
Only the morning of your eyes and the day of our
faces to be together.
Only the time of our hands with its vexed motor and the note
of the thrush on the guava branch
in the shining rain for the rest of our lives.